Cops And Psychiatrists Coming Apart

In his brilliant book, Coming Apart, Charles Murray describes how American society has split into two distinct groups. On one side you have college-educated professionals. On the other, you have the blue collar crowd. It's more than an economic division, it's a division of experience. Over time, the lives of the professional class have become more and more separated from, in my words here, people who know how to do real things.

Driving back from Seattle over the last few days, we went through rural Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and California. These were lower-middle-class to poor places. We saw ranches, factories, prisons and farms along with their support industries like machinery repair, feed stores and diners.

I loved it.

The people there made things. They fixed things. I'm sure that most of them didn't have degrees and were scorned as racists by the Elites. It was the heart of Deplorable Nation. They would never have come up with an idea as absurd as having psychiatrists going with cops into violent situations.

I was fortunate to miss last night's debate. Instead, I smoked a chicken and supped with wife kitteh and one of our sons. I did see a couple of ghastly lowlights this morning. In one of them, Joe Biden said we needed to have psychiatrists join the police for calls like the one where Jacob Blake was assaulting his ex-girlfriend. This is not to single out Biden, I've heard Elites suggest this before. It's a ludicrous idea, born from never having done anything real.

Cop calls aren't scheduled like Senate committee meetings. You can't staff the things in advance. One minute, they're changing a tire, the next they're providing a traffic break for a wreck, the next they're taking down a robbery report, the next they're trying to get Jacob Blake under control.

The patrol car isn't a school bus. It's got a front seat for the cops and a back seat for the perps. Just where is the therapist going to sit? Is she going to ride with them all day? Is she a cop and does she have a gun and a badge? Does she twiddle her thumbs in the back seat most of 40 hours a week, waiting for that moment when she can ask, "And how did that make you feel?"

The cops respond to calls like Jacob Blake's ASAP. When some woman or child is getting thumped by a thug, the cops don't have time to swing by Therapists R Us and pick up a shrink. The idea is preposterous.

And yet, here we are, talking about it as if it made sense.

Here's an idea: The ANTIFA / BLM riots are fairly predictable in location and time. Let's try this idea out there. Send in a squad of therapists and let's see how they do.

Old Cotton

 ... vs new cotton.

I just got back from what was effectively a full, 40-hour work week of driving and I'm beat. I went out back into my tiny cotton patch and discovered that a whole bunch of bolls had popped. My Red Foliated is the most active. It's a young, modern cotton. My Nankeen, an Antebellum heirloom cotton, is not far behind. It comes out brown. My Mississippi Brown, another Antebellum heirloom, is taking it's own, sweet, Southern time. 

I love my Mississippi Brown. It makes me smile.

I'm pretty beat and am smoking a chicken for one of our sons while I drink some craft beer, so a couple of photos is all I can do.

I hope y'all are having a great week. Enjoy!

Old, Nankeen cotton.

New, Red Foliated cotton.

The East Side Sprint

I'm in Fruitland, Idaho blogging from my phone because I left my laptop at our son's place in Seattle. Oh well.

Driving from coastal Washington to Idaho, I was struck by the narrow strip of green on the west coast. East of the Cascades, Washington turns into SoCal, an arid land of rolling hills. It has rivers, but it's not lush like Dixie. 

A grinding drive or not, it's been a good trip. We're heading to Bishop by way of Reno today. There should be some pretty views. 

Now let's see if I can share some of yesterday's photos... 

The first one is from inside the Cascades. The second is post-Cascades. Enjoy! 

Dog Dash, A Puppy Delivery Service

 It's not Door Dash for noms, it's Dog Dash for puppies.

This week, wife kitteh and I grabbed the very unique hound pictured below, a Korean Mastiff - Pit Bull mix, and sprinted to Seattle to deliver him to our son who lives up here. Our son couldn't get a break from work to get the dog himself. 

Originally, wife kitteh had intended to take him on a plane, but even at 7 weeks, he was too big for the largest crate you can take on board. That made me her driver and we blasted up here in a day and a half. After working almost a full day, we had 6 hours of driving on Thursday. Friday was a 13-hour marathon, 15 hours including stops, that started around 0330.

Ugh.

Anyway, the little brute, soon to be a huge brute, has been delivered and today we start the trip back.

His name is Bandit because he looks like the dog from Johnny Quest. JQ's dog was compact and convenient. This guy is going to end up the size of a warehouse.

On the way up, we took I-5 the whole way, which brought us through Portland. From the freeway at least, Portland is a pit. It's filthy, run down and saturated with homeless encampments. We saw several significant ones from the car as we zipped through.

Given the rioting in Portland, we're not going home that way. You have no idea when BLM is going to decide to close off the freeway and while I'm more than ready to drive our SUV straight through the protesters to save wife kitteh, I'm not ready to go to prison for life just yet. Instead, we'll go through the sane states of Idaho and Nevada.

It's early in the morning right now and I woke up at my regular hour of 0400. I'm watching the hyperactive little dude while the other two get some sleep. That means there's no time for thinking and writing. I've got to run and check to see what he's destroying now with his Jaws of Doom™.

As a closing request, please, please, please don't ask me to bring you a dog from more than a thousand miles away. For the love of Pete, just go to your local animal shelter and get one there.

What 4-Year-Old Boys Need

I'm on travel, supporting wife kitteh and one of our sons, so although I brought my laptop, I'm not going to open it today to blog. Instead, I'll post something short from my phone.

Somewhere out there is a 4 year old black boy. He should be learning his numbers and letters and shapes and colors. He doesn't have a father to teach him because his father never married his mother. His mom can't help him because someone like Breonna Taylor and her crew sold his mom drugs and now her brain is so fried that she can't do a good job as a mother.

When do we talk about kids like that instead of talking about Breonna Taylor?

Systemic Leprechaun Racism

And I thought we Catholics were steeped in mysticism. Dig this bit out of Princeton, a, Ivy League bastion of the Elites.

The Department of Education is investigating whether Princeton violated the Civil Rights Act after the school's president, Christopher Eisgruber, said that racism remains "embedded" in the university. In response to the department's inquiry, Princeton claimed that the school does not actively discriminate against minority students and faculty, but also that systemic racism still exists on campus.

"Princeton has long been committed to creating and maintaining a community where all can thrive, and stands by its representations … that is complies with all laws and regulations governing equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and harassment," the Princeton letter reads. "The university also stands by our statements about the prevalence of systemic racism and our commitment to reckon with its continued effects."

So they have systemic racism, but it doesn't manifest itself in any measurable way. How magically delicious.

This is Lucky Charms territory here.

It's Nazi Tantrums All The Way Down

Why are they rioting? After months and months of this madness, why are we still at it? Why do the Democrat political leaders, whose cities are being trashed and whose tax base are being wrecked, still support it? 

It's now obvious that Black Lives Matter has been a disaster for black lives. Blacks are dying in much larger numbers as the police pull back and the gangs run wild in the streets. By any objective measure, Black Lives Matter has been a failure. 

This article in the NYT finally clued me into just why this is happening. Candace Owens tried to tell me over and over that this was toddlers throwing tantrums, but I didn't really get it. The article describes how the protests in Portland have morphed from direct attacks on anything and everything downtown to calls for the suburbanites to rise up and join the rioters.

If you read the article looking for just what the rioters hope to accomplish and where it is that they disagree with the authorities, you won't find it. All you can find are emotions.

Terrance Moses was watching protesters against police brutality march down his quiet residential street one recent evening when some in the group of a few hundred suddenly stopped and started yelling...

“It went from a peaceful march, calling out the names, to all of a sudden, bang, ‘How dare you fly the American flag?’” said Mr. Moses... “They said take it down. They wouldn’t leave. They said they’re going to come back and burn the house down.”...

The marches in Portland are increasingly moving to residential and largely white neighborhoods, where demonstrators with bullhorns shout for people to come “out of your house and into the street” and demonstrate their support...

Others, frustrated that little has changed since Mr. Floyd was killed, say that sitting idly and watching a protest without participating nowadays is to show tacit support for racism...

“Everyone was looking for solutions at first, but now it’s just a nightly fight that has gotten progressively more violent — and every neighborhood worries that the fight will come to their neighborhood,” Mr. Burke said. “It’s: ‘Wake up, wake up, you need to be in the street protesting if you stand for this.’”...

Protesters that night broke into the Portland Police Association building and set it on fire. A man was later seen scrubbing the sidewalk graffiti — a popular message was “PPB = KKK,” meaning that the Portland Police Bureau is the Ku Klux Klan... 

A small free literature selection was set up on the grass and overseen by three people in ski masks. It was a popular offering, and people crowded around, craning to see the pamphlets.

Titles included “Why Break Windows”; “I Want To Kill Cops Until I’m Dead”; “Piece Now, Peace Later: An Anarchist Introduction to Firearms”; “In Defense of Smashing Cameras”; and “Three-Way Fight: Revolutionary Anti-Fascism and Armed Self Defense.”

It goes on and on and on like this. Then there are the endless reference to the races of the people mentioned. In keeping with my model that we're watching the birth of a movement akin to the Nazis, I've changed black to German and white to Jewish in these quotes so you can see how close it is.

Mr. Moses, who is German and runs a nonprofit group in the Portland, Ore., area

Stephen Green, an investor and entrepreneur in Portland who is German

Jessie Burke, who is Jewish and owns a coffee shop in the city

Ms. Murphy, who is German and hosts an educational children’s YouTube series

Stop looking for rationality in any of this. Stop looking for plans. Stop looking for definable goals. There are none. This is a mass-tantrum. They aren't fighting ideas, they are fighting "hate." It's infantile.

This is why it's so frustrating to try to find plans for the future on the left. There aren't any. Even seasoned political leaders like ultra-diverse German black lesbian Fraulein Mayor Lightfoot in Chicago doesn't have plans. As Wretchard the Cat cleverly allegorized on Twitter recently, she is just exploiting moral imbeciles and wrecking society as she does. 

She and the other well-connected, ultra-wealthy leftists will be able to use their money and power to escape to protected spaces when things finally fall apart completely. You won't.

So the next time you see rioters screaming at diners in outdoor cafes, demanding they give the Nazi salute and shout, "Heil Hitler!," realize that you're not looking at anything deeper than a hysterical, brownshirt toddler who is utterly convinced that they are fighting hate.

The Cotton Is Starting To Pop

 I swear, cotton must be the most Southern plant in the world. It takes its own sweet time doing everything. Right now, the plants are loaded with bolls, but they're just sitting there. Finally, I've got two that are popping.

This is the most ambitious of the cotton bolls. The one in the upper left is still only fixin' to pop.

I won't every grow cotton again. I'm glad I did it, but it's just not worth the effort as a backyard plant. Tobacco, I'll do that again, if only to try to get the fermentation right.

The Most Surreal Election Of Our Lifetimes

I don't know if it's the most important, but it's certainly the most surreal.

The Biden campaign called a lid on the day's events this morning at 9:22 AM. A lid means that Joe Biden will have no public appearances or interviews for the rest of the day. Here's his calendar of lids for September.

8 out of 22 days is a .363 batting average. That means that on any given day, there's a 36% chance that Joe Biden, the Democrats' nominee for President of the United States, will be unable to function in public.

Meanwhile, on the days when they feel it's possible for him to shuffle around and mumble at people in public, he uses a teleprompter in his interviews. That means he is reading his responses.

Someone else is answering the questions for him.

And the journalists interviewing him play along. That's some world-class journalisming going on right there.

At this point, the Elites have revealed themselves to be so utterly corrupt that I almost want them to win just to see what they'll do next.

Fathers To Cops To Violence Interrupters To Chaos

Love is love. All families are equal. Don't judge. Marriage is part of an oppressive, patriarchal system. Fight toxic masculinity.

In some neighborhoods, the illegitimacy rate is over 80%. Those neighborhoods, for some reason, have lots of crime. The cops aren't the answer because they're racist. The system is racist. You have privilege. No justice, no peace.

This is what progressive winning looks like.

“I’m scared for my coworkers, but it’s worrisome to see people that I care about just kind of in a dangerous area,” Hrubesky said.

A nearby business relayed a similar message to the inspector of the 3rd Precinct via email. They also sharing it’s hard to find employees who want to work in the area, and they are asking for a long-term plan.

Here is the response they received from Inspector Sean McGinty:

As far as a long-term plan I don’t have one. I have lost 30% of my street officers since the end of May. Budget cuts from COVID-19 and an additional 1.5 million from the council in August we have let go 17 CSO’s and cancelled a recruit class of 29. A potential Cadet class slated for January of 2021 was also eliminated. I takes about a year to get a police Officer onto the streets with hiring, backgrounds and field training so reinforcements aren’t coming anytime soon. 

Italics in the original.

The progressives on the Minneapolis city council sound like Wehrmacht toadies near the end of the war. 

The city council, as The Daily Wire reported Tuesday, demanded the police answer for the surge in violence, even as city council members have spent the last several months demonizing law enforcement. City Council president, Lisa Bender, who led the effort to defund the police — an effort sidelined by the city’s Charter Commission over concerns the council had no real plan to handle crime once the police had been disbanded — even went so far as to accuse police officers of being “defiant,” and implied that Minneapolis cops were deliberately ignoring violence.

"We have called for maximum effort and you have failed to deliver!' shout the Democrats to the cops.

Not to worry, they have a plan. They're going to hire Violence Interrupters. 

“If we have these systems in place we are getting ahead of the violence,” said (Minneapolis Council member Phillipe) Cunningham.  “That’s why I have advocated so strongly for the violence interrupters, because if they are interrupting the violence before the guns are being fired, then the MPD doesn’t have to respond to that violence.”

What's a Violence Interrupter? It's someone who goes to a place where violence is about to happen and talks everyone out of it. No, really. Here are some of the responsibilities of a Violence Interrupter.

• Gain information on potential conflicts in hotspot communities.

• Formulate action plans to help resolve conflicts.

• Attend outreach worker/violence interrupter meetings.

• Meet with high‐risk individuals and groups on a daily basis to discuss issues.

• Work to prevent acts of violence and help to prevent all potential retaliatory shootings.

Formulating action plans is my favorite. 

In Chicago, the Violence Interrupters have been interrupted by Donation Interrupters. Turning to the city, which is managed by the highly diverse and yet curiously ineffective black lesbian, Lori Lightfoot, has resulted in the Violence Interrupters meeting with the effects of the Tax Receipt Interrupters.

One of Chicago’s largest gun violence prevention programs is facing a $5 million funding loss this year — nearly a third of its overall budget. As private investors slowly pull back, the group’s leader says city officials need to do more.

“The challenge that I face right now is that as much as myself and my staff want to provide services, I can’t do that,” said Eddie Bocanegra, the senior director of the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative, or READI Chicago.

READI, launched in 2017, is a violence reduction program that offers paid transitional employment, training, and cognitive behavioral therapy to men at highest risk of being victims and perpetrators of the city’s gun violence. More than 600 men have entered the program. A preliminary evaluation of READI’s effectiveness shows promising results. 

READI’s financial dilemma arrives at a moment of staggering unemployment and a workforce reshaped by the coronavirus pandemic. Chicago is also facing an increase in violence that’s now on pace with 2016, when shootings and homicides spiked to levels not seen in decades. Bocanegra says the uptick has claimed the lives of five READI’s participants, who were shot and killed in a span of five weeks earlier this summer. 

Scorning traditional marriage, then removing the cops and replacing them with an unknown number of violence interrupters has resulted in increased crime for some reason. Maybe it's the same problem that Baltimore, similarly managed by "diverse" people, has with illiteracy. That's a problem of numbers. How do you replace all those toxically masculine, oppressive patriarchs?

If you think there is any chance at all that you will be able to find 6600 people, unrelated to the students, who are going to have the time, energy, know-how and willingness to take on that task, please contact your local mental hospital and schedule a straight-jacket fitting session.

There is a solution, however. Like I said in yesterday's post, those mentors are out there. We just have to be willing to demand they do the job.

I know where we can find the necessary volunteers to act as mentors for the kids. Mom's bed. The men found therein can be given a special title. We'll call them "husbands." We can give them a special token of appreciation. Maybe it could be a ring they could wear. We could also give them a certificate acknowledging their volunteer status. We'll call that a "marriage license."

That is the only solution to the problem. There is no other. All of the screaming about flags and statues and white supremacists and Trump and Tucker Carlson and the far-right and the alt-right is simply irrelevant noise. It's like blaming leprechauns for the suffering of these kids.

Rites Of Purification

Maybe that's what the blue city riots are. I just watched video of rioters in Washington, DC screaming in someone's face. It was interminable and filled with cursing, so I won't post it here. I'm sure you can imagine it quite well.

I've posited that this is a Democrat civil war, but today, for the first time, I'm beginning to wonder. What if instead, it's a purification rite? By now, it's not like the Democrats running DC and Chicago and New York can't see what's happening in Minneapolis which is only a month ahead of them in an evolutionary sense.

Dig this.

What if this is a feature and not a bug?

By that, I mean that by now, the Democrats running these cities know full well that the middle class are starting to leave. These are the impure ones, the racists, the religious fanatics, the deplorables. They are full of hate. Irredeemable as they are, until the Democrats can force them into re-education camps, the only way to achieve a city based on love is to get rid of people who hate.

This explanation assumes that the Democrats have no idea from whence their tax money comes. That's the part for me that is inconceivable. I mean, I can see that some of the fanatical progressives think it comes from the Money Fairy, but there's got to be a significant portion of the professional political class in the Democratic Party the can see where this is headed.

And that, thinking out loud as I type, leads me back to the original assertion. This is a Democrat civil war.

Change my mind.

I Don't Understand The Ginsburg Threats

With apologies to Charles Dickens:

RBG was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Kamala Harris signed it. And Kamala's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. RBG was as dead as a doornail.

Well, things are heating up, aren't they?

Actually, they're already a bit hot in blue cities, what with the ongoing Democrat civil war and all that. Still, there's a promise of an increase in temperature.

I have no idea who this particular blue-check celebrity is. I chose her tweets at random, illustrative of an avalanche of them I've seen so far.

My reaction: Meh.

Haven't we seen the rioting already? Isn't it confined to blue cities? If Democrat constituencies want to burn Democrat cities to force everyone else to give Democrats more power, then by all means, have at it. It's like Mafia goons beating themselves to force the rest of us to pay protection money.

Chicago's Magnificent Mile might get nuked again? Well, OK then.

What's Really At Stake

Almost nothing is at stake.

If the unthinkable happens and the Trumpster pushes another originalist justice through onto the Supreme Court resulting in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the only thing that happens is that abortion law goes back to the states. That means we all get to vote on laws in our communities instead of having five robed Ivy League wonks tell us what we can and cannot do.

As usual lately, we're screaming about trivialities.

California Or Alabama?

Wife kitteh and I have two recurring disagreements.

Wife kitteh wants a pool. Our lot isn't designed for a pool, so adding one would be very difficult.

I want to move to the South. Wife kitteh doesn't want to live in the heat and humidity.

I've argued that if we lived in or around Fairhope, AL, we'd have plenty of land (and money!) for a pool. We'd also have green instead of brown. I find San Diego depressing after about June 1. Everything is dead and dried for months on end. I think that's why we have all those wildfires, but I'm told I hate SCIENCE, so who knows.

Today, I went to NOAA's excellent climate data site and got results for Fairhope and Miramar NAS. Here are the results, using daily maximums only.

You'll have to click on it to read the labels.

I've been complaining lately that we've had bayou weather without the bayou. That is, San Diego has been hot and humid, but still dry and dead. Why stay here if we're going to get Dixie weather anyway?

Well, to be perfectly honest, the big difference is consistency. Yes, San Diego has some brutal days, ones that are worse than the Gulf Coast. What Bama has is consistency. Come May, you're facing hot, humid weather without a break until October. There's one particular two-week stretch you can see in the data, right at the end of June, where San Diego had lovely days with highs around 75. Fairhope was in the mid-80s the whole time.

In late August, there was a gap in the data, so I don't trust that stretch, but it's still illustrative.

It might have been more useful to plot the delta between the two lines, but I've lost interest in this project. We're not going to move no matter what now. One of our sons and his wife bought a house and grandchildren are on the horizon. Even the Marines couldn't get wife kitteh out of San Diego now.

Sigh, y'all.

I'm So Over The Rona

Data

Here's the data for California, which is run by people who believe in SCIENCE and have everything properly locked down.

Here's the data for Florida, which is run by bigoted evangelicals who hate SCIENCE and have allowed private citizens to run wild in the streets.

They look pretty much identical to me.

The bigger question, however, is one of reference points. Is 3,116 new cases a big number? Is it bigger than the flu right now? Is it smaller than pneumonia? Is it as deadly has a hangnail or is it like being shot in the head?

What am I supposed to do with that graph?

Our Cantor of Chemistry has similar issues, albeit stated with a good deal more rigor even though he hates SCIENCE.

Our Goober has made the location of the goal posts fluid and uncontrollable.  Actually they have become so idiotic and convoluted that based on the explanations I've seen (admittedly filtered through former journalism majors), I simply can not say that I understand them sufficiently that I could actually calculate them.  Hey, I've got a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry, published peer reviewed articles in a bunch of physics journals, and taught myself the mathematics of General Relativity for fun, but clearly I should have known that this is just so complicated that I probably shouldn't have expected to be able to understand it.

Read the whole thing, if you dare.

Masks

Look, I have no problem wearing masks inside of stores. Wearing masks outside is simply idiotic. Watching politicians give speeches outdoors while wearing masks makes me want to add a dunce cap to their outfit.

No one is within 20 feet of you, you dork.

I guess I just hate SCIENCE.

Maybe It's Time To Quit

As far as I can reason out, when the Chicom Flu gets within normal flu territory in terms of infections and lethality, it ought to be time to quit the pandemic panic and go back to normal life. 

Are we there yet?

The University Of Chicago Joins The Luftwaffe

 ... in the fight against imperialism! After all, dig these lyrics from that toe-tapper, Bomben Auf Engeland.

We give to the British Lion
The last deciding blow
We have the right
An empire to destroy
That will be our proudest day!

Now dig this latest instruction* from das Universität von Chicago.

Note: For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago Hebrew Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with German Studies. We understand German Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages and time periods.

Hebrew as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-Germanness. Our discipline is responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why… In light of this historical reality, we believe that undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Germanness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere.

* - I'm pretty sure this is what it says. I typed it in from memory, so there may have been some misinterpretation along the way. Work with me here, people.

The Last Rose

 ... photo from my mom's garden.

We're working on selling my parents' house these days. We're hoping it's sold and finished two months from now. In the meantime, here's what might be my last photo of one of my mom's prize roses.

Enjoy.

Nostradamus Is Dead

Pop quiz question: Why did sports leagues used to ban political statements and actions during events associated with their leagues?

Pop's Answer: First, it could alienate customers. Second, it had nothing to do with the product being sold. Third, you lost control of your brand if you associated it with something outside of your sport.

It's the third one that blows my mind today. What happened over the weekend was perfectly predictable. The left has been shouting about institutional racism and cops killing black people for no reason for quite some time now. Well, over the weekend, someone decided to take revenge for the mythical, racist, police brutality.

Two LA sheriff's deputies were shot by a black person while they sat inside their car.

Because the NFL decided to hitch their wagons to Black Lives Matter, they've managed to get entangled in this shooting as well as the riots in Lancaster over the weekend. Those broke out when a knife-wielding Maniac of Color (MoC) rushed at a cop and got shot for his troubles.

Doesn't this make you want to buy authentic, team-logo NFL merchandise?

Even before this, sports found itself under water in terms of positive and negative views. Sports found itself underwater. It was also seen less favorably than lawyers. Lawyers.

I don't think their ratings went up after the cops were shot and BLM rioted over the death of a deranged stabber.

Like I said, all of this was all perfectly predictable.

Clearly, Nostradamus is indeed dead.

Bonus Thought: Now that they've opened this particular Pandora's Box, I don't see how they can get themselves out of this predicament. If they try to go back to the old, sports-only ways, a whole bunch of players will be upset and the progressive news media will rip them to pieces.

What a mess.

Global Warming Is Irrelevant To The Fires

 ... because the time frames are all wrong. Global Warming Climate Change Global Warming takes decades to occur or reverse. Forest fire seasons are annual. Even if we all immediately began to live in yurts made of goat dung, we'd still have to deal with fires for 20 more years while the climate cooled warmed cooled changed cooled.

Let's assume that California Governor Goober, aka Gavin Newsom, is right and Global Warming Climate Change Global Warming has dramatically increased fire risks, just like he has been telling us for years. That doesn't make him look better, it makes him look worse.

Just what has his team been doing while the forests have been drying up under drought conditions? He's basically telling us that he predicted these fires, but didn't take any steps to reduce the risk. If that's true, then he's an incompetent moron. Dig this excellent article on steps to prevent massive fires like the ones we're experiencing.

The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.” ...

(B)etween 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire...

We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.

Megafires, like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so far), will continue to erupt until we’ve flared off our stockpiled fuels. No way around that.

I can promise you this is true. I've lived in SoCal for more than 40 years and you see this situation whenever you go into our canyons or state parks. Come August, the place is dry as a bone. Each tree is an incendiary bomb. In fact, when fire came right up to the eaves of my parents' home a few years back, all of the pine trees in their 3-acre back yard practically exploded. Between the dry wood and the resin in the trees, they were torches just waiting to be lit.

Meanwhile, the press, who struggle to comprehend even the most basic science, reports either on the human interest stories or the political ramifications of the fires. It's maddening. We used to do controlled burns and preventative forestry which is why we didn't have these megafires. Now we get lectures on Global Warming Climate Change Global Warming while the place burns.

I feel like we're living through this kind of conversation.

"Governor Newsom, your administration let the fuel build up to the point that these fires became inevitable."

"I can't do anything about it because of Global Warming!"

"But you knew this was coming. You even told us it was coming."

"There was nothing we could do because you elected the wrong person president."

"What difference does that make? You could still have taken steps to cut down on the fuel load."

"We can't do anything until you all vote for Democrats!"

"Even if we did that, you'd still have to cut down on the fuel load to prevent more of these fires."

"STOP DENYING SCIENCE!" 

Just admit it. You hate SCIENCE.

Ignorance Is But A Generation Away

 As a present for my recent birthday, one of our sons agreed to read a book of my choosing with me. I selected Chesterton's masterpiece, The Everlasting Man. We're consuming it as an audio book and sharing our reflections as we go. Everlasting Man is Chesterton's response to the atheist analyses of the evolution of Man and the comparative religion studies of his era, circa 1920.

This is my fourth or fifth time through it. It's so dense with wisdom that I learn something new every time. As we were discussing a portion of it a few weeks ago, my son asked me why people didn't know this or that part of it. He asked in a way that was new to me. He does that frequently. His mind thinks in very different ways than mine. I find that delightful.

His question made real to me something I've read, but never truly grasped. Every generation must be taught our culture and faith anew. 

It makes total sense when you think about it. Babies are born knowing nothing and they only learn what we tell them and what they experience. Had you taken my son and raised him in the ancient ways of the Arapaho, he'd know nothing of math or literacy. Instead, he's an electrical engineer with a solid foundation in the classics gained from Catholic schooling. Our children only know what we teach them.

That means that Shakespeare, Dickens and Kipling are only a generation away from obscurity.

I've read quite a bit of theology and philosophy, of military history and biographies. I try to read as much as I can from the primary sources, preferably autobiographies. I'm not very familiar with Shakespeare, but I will take it as a given that he's a genius. I know that Dickens, Kipling and Chesterton are geniuses. That is, their work stands head and shoulders above the rest. There are currently no adequate substitutes for them. If you lose them, that wisdom and artistry will be lost for a very, very long time.

Someone may come along, a century or two from now, who can restate some of what Chesterton said. At that point, a portion of his genius will be available once more if we lose him now. And if we lose him now, his particular brilliance will be lost forever. There aren't many revival movements for now-obscure authors from long ago.

Rudyard Kipling said it well in his poem, Recessional.

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

   Or lesser breeds without the Law—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust

   In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

   And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word—

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Goofy, Fat Chihuahua

 She really does sleep like this.

There are times when you'll glance in her direction and see her front legs up in the air while she snoozes. For the life of me, I can't figure out how this is comfortable.

The Lizard Empire Expands!

 I posited the Lizard Empire here. 

One of the reasons the Romans liked a big empire was that it pushed the borders, where lived dangerous barbarians, far, far away from them. The larger the Empire, the safer you were, no matter where you were. I'd like to suggest that Jeffrey Epstein, children in drag and trannies in the library are all part of the modern-day American cultural Empire. That is, acceptance of their behavior expands the empire by normalizing ever more degeneracy.

Remember, your behavior might be degenerate under some definition, but the farther out the borders go, the less degenerate you look.

I call it the Lizard Empire because it's designed to feed the most primal part of our brains, our lizard brains, wherein we only care about food, danger and sex. In that post I suggested that possible next advances for the Lizard Empire might include the following.

1. It's OK for men in evening gowns, heavy makeup and heels to twerk while children sit on their laps.
2. Since it's OK to let children choose their genders, children choosing to engage in sex play with adults is OK.
3. Since it's OK for Desmond to take money from gay men for his performances, it's OK for Desmond to give lap dances for money.
4. Since it's OK to get paid for porn performances, prostitution is OK.
5. Combine all of these and you get: Paying to have sex with children is OK so long as the child consents.

Enter the Netflix movie, Cuties. It's a child porn flick about a team of 11-year-old girls twerking.

It's every bit as bad as it sounds.

Elsewhere, Joe Biden's interlocutor, Cardi B, has a number one smash hit with her ode to prostitution, WAP. That's every bit as bad as it sounds, too.

So where does that leave the Lizard Empire? Well, let's update our list.

1. It's OK for men in evening gowns, heavy makeup and heels to twerk while children sit on their laps. 
• Close, but not yet. The girls are twerking, so let's consider this a reconnaissance in force.
2. Since it's OK to let children choose their genders, children choosing to engage in sex play with adults is OK. 
• The battle is joined! Twerking in front of adults is only a short step from touching.
3. Since it's OK for Desmond to take money from gay men for his performances, it's OK for Desmond to give lap dances for money. 
• This position is being surrounded even as we speak.
4. Since it's OK to get paid for porn performances, prostitution is OK. 
• Cardi B, a strong, black woman, has take this ground and now awaits reinforcements to defend the territory. Counter-attacks by social conservatives have been disorganized as the leaders of the Catholic Church have been distracted by rumors of white supremacists hiding under their beds.
5. Combine all of these and you get: Paying to have sex with children is OK so long as the child consents. 
• Soon. Very soon.

Our cultural elites have lined up behind child porn.

Cutting Off Chicago To Spite Your Face

 At a recent dinner party, some Chicago natives laughed about the worry over mail-in vote fraud. Ha ha! That happens all the time in Chicago! How naive you are!

Yes, well, it might happen all the time in Chicago, but what if the red parts of the country, which geographically is almost all of it, including the countryside surrounding the Holy City of Chicago, doesn't want to have their election determined by crooks? They may take a dim view of that.

Having read a few essays on the topic, they all focus on unrest if Trump wins a contested election, unrest akin to what we're seeing now. What of it? If the people in blue cities want to burn their cities down, by all means, have at it. It's not like they can do much to the red portions of the country. Look at what they're doing now to Billings, Montana. Nothing.

Turning the problem around, if the election is clearly fraudulent a la Chicago's crookedness, what might happen if Biden won? How long can Chicago hold out without power, water, food and fuel?

Nonsense! Such acts of insurrection would never be permitted. Law enforcement would put a quick end to any roadblocks. You know, the same law enforcement that the Democrats want to throw to the wolves. That law enforcement.

Hmm. Maybe the problem is a bit stickier than we thought.

Maybe we shouldn't be using the least-reliable method of voting in a divided country that is heavily armed.

What could go wrong?

Bonus Link: Read Kurt Schlichter's excellent take on how difficult it would be to use the army to restore order in Portland.

Spackling Your Chicken

 ... is what it looked like when I applied the Alabama White BBQ Sauce to my smoked chicken last night.

I'd been wanting to try Alabama White Sauce for quite some time and had even bought a chicken to put on the smoker as the proper vehicle for it when, out of the blue, Mary from Deep South Dish posted her recipe for ... wait for it ... Smoked Chicken with Alabama White Sauce. It was serendipity squared!

The recipe calls for a spicy rub and then a half hour of smoking. After the half hour you brush on the white sauce and smoke it some more. The sauce itself is made of mayo, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar and various spices. When I tasted it, the vinegar dominated and I wondered if Chicago-Yankee wife kitteh would be disgusted with the result. Nope! She declared it excellent and a good meal was had by all.

Mayonnaise on chicken?!? You must be mad!

Ugh! It looks like spackle or maybe toothpaste. Horrid!

Wait a minute, that looks pretty good. Let's eat!

In The End, It's Dry And Dead Anyway

I've got lots of cotton bolls in my patch these day. They look like small tennis balls. They're very hard, suggesting that they will pop like popcorn. I finally looked up the life cycle of the cotton boll and discovered that very soon, my plants will be dry and dead. Dig this photo from a grown-up's cotton farm.

The leaves have all dried up and fallen off.

This makes me wonder if there's a point to my continued struggle against the aphids. They're back as are their ant protectors. Following Tim's advice, I made my own insecticidal soap with ... wait for it ... dish soap and water.

True Story: I then looked around for a spray bottle with which to apply it. Annoyed when I realized we didn't have any spares, it took me ten minutes to realize I could use the spray bottle from the existing insecticidal soap. I told wife kitteh about my triumphant discovery and said, "The only problem is that I need to remove the "Insecticidal Soap" label and replace it with one that says, "A Different Insecticidal Soap."

At any rate, the plants are headed towards desiccation no matter what I do. The leaves on some of them have already started to dry up and fall off. I had attributed this to our current heat wave and the aphids, but I'm now betting that it's just the plant's natural life cycle.

Great Smoked Pork Ribs And A Bad Dinner Party

 Last night we had some friends over for dinner, so I made smoked pork ribs. I used the recipe from Myron Mixon's cookbook, Smokin'. It was different from the way we normally do them, notably in the use of a spray bottle with apple juice, vinegar and liquid, fake butter. In a previous effort, our ribs came out dry from the smoker, but these were fabulous. Spritzing for the win!

Fall-off-the-bone good in 3 hours.

As for the conversation at dinner, it was unpleasant as the husband of the couple tends to drink too much and he wouldn't lay off Trump bashing, particularly when wife kitteh told him I was going to vote for the guy. All he could talk about was how Trump was a liar and unstable and blah blah blah. I finally had to tell him that I don't pay attention to any of that. I don't care what the high school class presidents who went to Ivy League schools have to say and I don't listen to the gossip rags of the new media.

That shut him up briefly. Then they took the conversation into the riots and racism and things really went downhill.

Ugh.

Is it too much to ask to talk about aphids and cotton?

Abandoning Rochester

 ... is problematic because you'd have to reroute the railway lines that go through the city. Here's the map.

A map of US freight lines with Rochester circled in yellow. If you cut that link, you've got real problems.

I started musing about what might happen to the rest of us if we simply abandoned the cities to their fates. Rochester came up because they had riots last night. Apparently, photos surfaced of a naked, black man being held by cops in the middle of the street with a bag over his head. The dude was blasted out of his mind on PCP and had been spitting on them, claiming he had the Wuhan Flu. This was in March, at the height of the Kung Flu hysteria. The cops followed standard procedure and didn't abuse him. He later died from his PCP overdose.

Following the far-left playbook, mobs formed and smashed, looted and terrorized Rochester. Rochester has a Democrat mayor who is a black woman. Blah blah blah. Insert the standard description of the systemically racist system's power structure here. No surprises. It's as blue as blue can be.

In the past, I've argued that the riots will drive the Normals out and the cities will become more and more radical. This morning, I started musing, "And then what?"

Rochester's money comes from universities, health care and tech. As New York City is discovering to the tune of a $9B tax shortfall, that work can be performed anywhere. The city provides almost no irreplaceable services. Let's assume the Normals do indeed bail out of Rochester and the place becomes a massive CHAZ/CHOP dystopian wasteland. Who cares?

Well, we all do. Cities are cities because they are transportation hubs. We still need freight trains to move bulk goods. We definitely need the freeways so semi trucks can bring us the things we ordered from Amazon.

Looting and destroying local businesses and terrorizing the Normals until they leave is but a temporary evil. After a time, those people will relocate and, hopefully the wiser for their ordeal, set up lives in saner, redder locations. The transportation infrastructure is another thing entirely. If Rochester or any other hub goes feral and the progressives realize that they can bring down the racist system which is full of systemic racism by cutting rail lines in their cities, things will get rather lively indeed.

How do you protect a transportation grid that goes through hostile territory where the enemy doesn't wear uniforms or have a distinct chain of command? In the past, everyone from the Romans to the Union Army to the Wehrmacht solved that problem with disproportionate brutality against the locals. I'm not sure we've got better solutions now.

In case you wanted to see it, here's the obligatory video of the latest battle in the Democrat Civil War. For a full meal of rancid, leftist bile from Rochester, here's the hashtag on Twitter.

Black Lives Matter activists raid Rochester restaurants and trash them. This is what social justice looks like. pic.twitter.com/uBDVvV5pL7

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 5, 2020

What Is Your Racial Experience?

Maybe it doesn't really exist.

I work with a young man. He's 20, has a high school diploma and attended culinary school for a while. He was raised in western North Carolina. His momma didn't let him watch anything other than Nickelodeon and Disney channel when he was young. He's respectful almost to the point of timidity.

He loves to cook Italian food. He has videos of his cooking and they're beautiful. I love to cook, but he, many decades younger than me, cooks with elegance. His knife skills are superb. First thing in the morning, we trade food stories.

He's a conscientious worker and eager to learn, although he complains about having to learn things. He's the kind of guy who just wants to work and would rather not take classes.

He's black.

What does he have in common with the two fellows described in yesterday's blog post?

The initial story of Caleb Reed’s death was tragic enough: A 17-year-old activist with a bright future killed on a West Rogers Park sidewalk when someone shot from a passing car.

But a month later, as prosecutors brought charges in the case, a more devastating narrative emerged: Reed was killed by his own friend shooting blindly at a car down the street.

Nothing.

Our current race mania is built on lies.

My young friend and I have more in common with Chef Lola than we have with either white members of the New York City Ballet or Caleb Reed's gang.

Chicago Is Insane

I don't even know what I mean by that title, but the chances are that I mean every possible interpretation of it down to suggesting that the buildings and land are themselves insane.

Going back to the article I highlighted yesterday, I want to dive a bit deeper into it to see if we can expose all the layers of madness.

The initial story of Caleb Reed’s death was tragic enough: A 17-year-old activist with a bright future killed on a West Rogers Park sidewalk when someone shot from a passing car.

But a month later, as prosecutors brought charges in the case, a more devastating narrative emerged: Reed was killed by his own friend shooting blindly at a car down the street.

Insane: An activist with a bright future was walking with friends who carried guns and shot at passing cars. 

Video also shows that no one in the Malibu shot back until Reed began collapsing to the ground.

Insane: Apparently, just when the occupants of the car returned fire is a key point. 

Martin (the gunman) was college-bound, involved in mentoring and community service, and had himself been shot just last year, according to his attorney.

Insane: He was going to college where, presumably, he would discover that many of the other students didn't carry guns and shoot wildly at people in cars. Someone should have explained this to him. It would not only have saved his friend's life, but it would have softened the culture shock when he got to college.

Note: To explain to blacks in the hood that, in other communities, it's actually relatively rare to spray passing cars with bullets, would be, as I'm sure you guessed, racist.

Reed (the victim), 17, was a leader with Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, a coalition of community organizations advocating for racial justice in the education system. Members said they saw Reed as an activist full of potential, always pushing himself and others to work harder.

Insane: I guess that the folks who run Voices for Youth didn't explain to their staff that firing wildly at people in cars was, how shall we say this, not helpful. Of course not. That would have been racist.

Insane: Caleb was fighting for racial justice in the education system, but who was he fighting? I suppose he was fighting the system, but as far as I can tell, all of the leaders of the system in Chicago are black. They're certainly all Democrats.

Insane: Caleb was pushing everyone else to work harder? Really? How hard is it not to shoot at cars? Many people manage to do that every day. That would seem to be a pretty low bar.

After Martin’s arrest Sunday, he identified himself in a still from the surveillance video of the shooting, but denied having a gun and said he did not fire any shots, Murphy said.

When police showed him the video where he can be seen firing, Martin had no response.

Note: Well, that was a feeble defense. With brain power like that, the best college he could attend would be an Ivy League one or maybe a Jesuit one. Any of the others would have been too difficult.

“He’s so concerned ... he shoots his own friend (while) trying to shoot at the other car,” the judge said. “His lawyer tells me he’s on his way to college. Had he made it, that could have changed his life. … I typically don’t get this kind of young man charged with this kind of offense in front of me. I’m just stunned.”

Insane: The tone of this is what blew my mind when I originally read the article. The guy thinks nothing of carrying a gun and shooting at people in cars. It wasn't a tragedy that he was trying to kill the people in the car, it was that he killed the wrong person. Sigh. Before that friendly fire incident, he had such a bright future!

“What happened to Caleb is not a unique situation,” the statement (from Voices for Youth) read. “The tragic action that led to Caleb’s death is undeniably a call to invest in Black Lives.”

Insane: Or maybe it's a call to return to civilization. Perhaps married families could be the start. Nah. It's racism. You can tell because Chicago is festooned with Confederate flags. Also, did they ever track down those white supremacists that attacked Jussie Smollett? 

Note: I'm being picky here, but could we please use proper capitalization in our prepared statements? There is no reason to capitalize either the B or the L in black lives.

“You want to understand what was going through that young person’s mind,” Renaeu  (from Voices for Youth) said Tuesday. “You want to understand what could have happened to prevent that.”

Insane: Well, I hate to be the prude, but I'm thinking that married fathers who are taught to be accountable for the actions of their children might help. Maybe the older Mr. Reed could have disciplined his son as he was growing up so that shooting wildly while walking down the street was less likely.

As a 27-year-old mother of two sons, Renaeu said she thinks a lot about the way Chicago treats young Black men. She believes the key to stopping any future harm is to ensure Black children are given opportunities.

Insane: Well, until "B"lack children stop shooting at people, I'd have to say that opportunities will be limited. If they lack the self-control to restrain themselves from attempting to murder people in the street, I'm guessing that the list of available opportunities would be rather short.

Ultimate Insanity

Chicago is over a billion dollars in the red this year, thanks to their Draconian lockdowns and their penchant for rioting. A billion dollars in cuts in a city whose credit is shot from years of fiscal incompetence means massive cuts in social programs, education and basic services.

Everyone in this article are parasites. That is, none of them produce goods and services that result in tax revenues. Right now, the only thing that really matters in Chicago are lowered expenses and increased revenue. Everyone who is an activist or an organizer or an employee of the city is a net drain. Instead of talking about activists who fight racist leprechauns, the Tribune's reporters and editorial staff needs to be focused like a laser on more revenue and lower costs if they don't want trash piling up in their streets.

Like you, I was surprised to discover that trash pickup cost money.

I was even more surprised to find that almost all of Chicago's tax revenues come from taxes on profits and earnings.

Finally, I was staggered to realize that many businesses don't like to be looted. Dittos for productive citizens! I'm thinking that the activists fighting for racial justice ought to have a talk with them.

Fire Hoses And German Shepherds Required

If you're saying that the problem is systemic argle-bargle and you're vocally against argle-bargle and when you march with your anti-argle-bargle comrades, no German shepherds are released to hound you and no fire hoses spray you onto the ground, then the only conclusion is that the system doesn't give a rat's rear end about argle-bargle.

Concrete example: If I go in to work and say, "Racism is bad!" nothing will happen. If I go in to work and say, "Marriage is between one man and one woman!" I'm going to face some serious push-back and might even be sent to HR for disciplinary action. The system will not defend racism. The system will defend "marriage equality." Ergo, the system doesn't support racism. Systemic racism is a myth.

Gasping For Air

After reading this article about a Chicago teen who was shot by his own friend, I was gasping for air at the unspoken insanity.

Short version: A black teen got shot in the forehead by his friend, another black teen, who was actually firing in the general direction of a passing car that was filled with other black teens. Dig this bit.

“He’s so concerned ... he shoots his own friend (while) trying to shoot at the other car,” the judge said. “His lawyer tells me he’s on his way to college. Had he made it, that could have changed his life. … I typically don’t get this kind of young man charged with this kind of offense in front of me. I’m just stunned.”

He's a great guy. He's going to college! Other than the shooting at passing cars and blowing his friend's head off, he was just the sort we need. Don't worry, the standard lesson has been learned.

Laqueanda Reneau, an organizer with (Voices for Youth in Chicago Education), said members were taken aback when they first learned of the charges...

As a 27-year-old mother of two sons, Renaeu said she thinks a lot about the way Chicago treats young Black men. She believes the key to stopping any future harm is to ensure Black children are given opportunities.

Everyone in the story absolves them of any responsibility. This sort of thing is normal and natural. The real problem is Chicago. The "system," if you will. Meanwhile, the judge, who you would think is part of the "system," is as sympathetic as anyone.

I'm thinking the problem might lie somewhere else. 

Here, Caleb, the dude what was shot, protests against cops in the city schools.

He was shot. On the street. By his friend. Who was shooting wildly at a passing car.

No one in the article sees a problem with removing the cops from the schools.

You Can't Eat Cotton

 ... so don't plant it alongside edible plants.

In retrospect, my chief mistake with my cotton patch was to mix in some cayenne plants in the raised bed. That meant that when the aphids struck, my options were limited because I didn't want to put any poisons on the peppers. Had I planted nothing but cotton, I might have terminated the aphids with prejudice and a good dose of insecticides as well. Instead, I had to fight a protracted campaign against them and their ant allies.

Still, the cotton bolls are forming. They're like massive popcorn kernels about to pop. They are hard and dense. Knowing what's coming, I figure the cotton that emerges will be pretty large. I can't wait.

In the background, you can see some of the cayenne.

In the end, the ladybugs didn't do a complete job or maybe the aphids had even more insect allies, ones the ladybugs didn't want to eat. I had to spray down several of the plants with Safer Soap. It's allegedly non-toxic, but it means I'll have to thoroughly wash all of the cayenne peppers before I process them into Catican Bayou Hot Sauce.